Sony Reveals Radical New Smartphone Camera

Sony’s image sensors form the core imaging technology behind many leading cameras, and today the company has announced a world-first product which could dramatically improve the quality of smartphone photography.

Featuring the highest ever pixel resolution available for a smartphone, Sony’s new IMX586 stacked CMOS image sensor delivers 48 effective megapixels. That’s significantly more pixels than the primary camera in Huawei’s P20 Pro and more even than Sony’s own high-end A7R III mirrorless camera.

This high resolution is achieved by creating ultra-compact pixels only 0.8μm wide, allowing the 48MP to fit on a chip only 8mm in diagonal.

Sony's IMX586 image sensor

Sony

The main advantage of such a high pixel count is an increased digital zoom capability for both photo and video modes. Alternatively, the camera can save the full 48MP image to allow significant cropping later on while retaining acceptable detail.

Ultra-small pixels do have a significant disadvantage, however, in that smaller pixels are typically less efficient at capturing light than larger ones. This is one reason why some cameras, such as Sony’s A7S range, opt instead for a small number of large pixels in order to achieve better low light performance at the expense of resolution.

But excellent low light performance is fundamental to smartphone photography too, so the Sony IM586 implements a ‘Quad Bayer’ color filter array similar to that used by the Huawei P20 Pro.

The Sony IM586 can optionally maximize light sensitivity instead of image resolution by grouping 2x2 blocks of adjacent 0.8μm pixels into larger logical pixels of 1.6μm each. In this mode, the sensor will produce better low light images, but at a lower resolution of 12MP.

The Quad Bayer array combines adjacent pixels into larger super-pixels for improved light sensitivity at the expense of resolution

Sony

The Quad Bayer array makes grouping possible by arranging these adjacent 2x2 pixel groups with the same colored filter rather than different colors as would be the case with the standard Bayer array.

The Sony IM586 also promises superior dynamic range that is four times greater than ‘conventional products’, although the announcement stops short of actually naming any such products.

Another disadvantage of ultra-high resolution sensors is that the rest of the smartphone’s specs may also need to be considerably upgraded to handle all the extra image data. For example, if you want to retain the same shooting speeds as a 12MP camera, a 48MP device will need to transfer data at four times the rate and provide about four times the storage.

With the IMX586 also capable of capturing 30 full-resolution shots per second and 4K video at 90fps, there’s also a far greater burden on any image processing the phone may need to perform.

For this reason, I would expect to see the new sensor performing at its best only in flagship models for now, but these phones are likely to deliver stunning performance especially when configured with multi-camera solutions where the high resolution of the IM586 can be combined with better light sensitivity from secondary camera modules.